Water Block Effective @ High Ambient?

[Occoyo]

I live in Texas and like to save money on AC by keeping it at 80° for 8 months out of the year. If I get a water block kit, will it even be able to work properly because of the higher average temp of the water? I was thinking of making that the front intake so the radiator would at least be getting the "coolest" air. I'm not doing overclocking or anything crazy either.

[Crunchy Dragon]

At high ambient temperatures, water cooling is actually recommended.

 

Lots of folks in Africa, India, etc usually turn to watercooling when summer rolls around for them.

[Jurrunio]

5 hours ago, Occoyo said:

I'm not doing overclocking or anything crazy either.

Then basic air cooling will do. CPUs are efficient until you overclock them. You can even undervolt if it's still not cool enough.

[W-L]

6 hours ago, Occoyo said:

I live in Texas and like to save money on AC by keeping it at 80° for 8 months out of the year. If I get a water block kit, will it even be able to work properly because of the higher average temp of the water? I was thinking of making that the front intake so the radiator would at least be getting the "coolest" air. I'm not doing overclocking or anything crazy either.

It will help with component temps but note that the system will essentially be dumping that heat into the room so you will want to consider promoting better airflow through the room itlself either by using fans or keeping windows open. 

[Christophe Corazza]

10 hours ago, Occoyo said:

I live in Texas and like to save money on AC by keeping it at 80° for 8 months out of the year. If I get a water block kit, will it even be able to work properly because of the higher average temp of the water? I was thinking of making that the front intake so the radiator would at least be getting the "coolest" air. I'm not doing overclocking or anything crazy either.

 

With those ambient temperatures, I would go for water cooling as well. Although, to be honest, you should probably also get away with using a decent air cooler.

[cheek_b52]

For reference, I dont have a/c in my house and this past week it got up to 96F in the house and my system still ran fine (ekwb cooled 8600k @4.7ghz and GTX1080 oc'd) the temps were the same delta from ambient as normal, just  shifted up by the change in ambient.

 

iirc it was like 118F on the gpu and spikes to 140F on the cpu with it normally in the high 120F range.  I did go a little overkill with a 360 and 240 radiator setup. 

 

However, my living room setup (i5-7500 and evga 1080 SC, both aircooled) did show a higher delta under load, and fans running much harder than normal, than when ambient was 70F. So i would recommend liquid cooling.